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Smarter Than You Think
Summary Smarter Than You Think by Canadian journalist Clive Thompson examines how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever before It’s undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes. The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and investigation. We learn more and retain information longer, write and think with global audiences in mind, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world around us. Modern technology is making us smarter and better connected, both as individuals and as a society. In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation—from the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old. Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways. There’s the seventy-six-year-old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment, giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life going back decades. There are the courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant. There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade and solved it collaboratively—in only one month. But Smarter Than You Think isn't just about pioneers, nor is it simply concerned with the world we inhabit today. It’s about our future. How are computers improving our memory? How will our social “sixth sense” change the way we learn? Which tools are boosting our intelligence—and which ones are hindering our progress? Smarter Than You Think embraces and interrogates this transformation, offering a provocative vision of our shifting cognitive landscape. Quotes "We're all playing advanced chess these days. We just haven't learned to appreciate it." pg. 6 "Status updates give us an ESP-like awareness of those around us." pg. 6 "The 'extended mind' theory of cognition argues that the reasons humans are so intellectually dominant is that we've always outsourced bits of cognition, using tools to scaffold our thinking into ever-more-rarefied realms." pg. 6 "Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about." pg. 7 "With every innovation, cultural prophets bickered over whether we were facing a technological apocalypse or a utopia." (pg 7) "The future is already here-- it's just not very evenly distributed." pg. 9 "I have one caveat to offer. If you were hoping to read about the neuroscience of our brains and how technology is "rewiring" them, this volume will disappoint you." pg.13 "Memory is one of the most crucial and mysterious parts of our identities; take it away, and our identity goes away, too, as families wrestling with Alzheimer's quickly discover." pg. 23 "The real power of digital memories will be to trigger our human ones." pg. 39 "We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand." pg. 51 "Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions." pg.52 "Unbalanced districts are not purely a result of greed and deceit."pg. 86 "If we want to have a data-literate future, we need to figure out which tools serves our thinking and which ones don't. As with all cognitive shifts, that requires work." (pg. 93) "The moving image isn't just easier to parse and critique" (pg. 98) "The real challenge of using machines for transitive memory lies in the inscrutability of their mechanics." pg. 130 "Young people live in a world where their daily activities are challenged by digital roots- from Facebook to photo-sharing apps to Google- yet few understand how these tools work." pg. 195 "Collaborative mapping is, in the world of civics, a new literacy." P. 266 "In many ways, the biggest conundrum for politics in the digital age is how it moves speech into a private sector." (P. 272) "Yet the trust is, if you want to talk to society at large, you need to work openly in the huge, for-profit spaces- because the whole point of large-scale public change is to reach as many people as possible." pg. 274 Think About It Video blogging has become increasingly popular within the last five years, and many YouTube users upload vlogs on their channel daily. Rather than using these videos as an encyclopedia of their life, many users view them as a scrapbook. These two ideas are on two different scales, but there are still really similar. Did anyone else connect the two? Questions From Class